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The Cinematic Orchestra's sound, in both live and studio contexts, employs a live band which improvises along with a turntablist and electronic elements such as samples provided by Swinscoe. In their studio releases Swinscoe will often remix the live source material to produce a combination of live jazz improvisation with electronica, such that it is difficult to tell where the improvisation ends and the production begins.

Their debut album, Motion, was released in 1999. The critical success of that album led to them being asked to perform at the Director's Guild Awards ceremony for the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Award to film director Stanley Kubrick.[1]

The band were asked by the organisers of the Porto European City of Culture 2001 festival to write a new score to Dziga Vertov's classic 1929 Soviet Unionsilent filmMan with a Movie Camera, to be performed live in accompaniment with a showing of the film. The work differed from the band's usual compositions due to its live performance, ruling out the post production work that was present on Motion. The Cinematic Orchestra toured with the work and later released it on an album of the same name. Many of the compositions originally created for Man with a Movie Camera were later adapted from live form (adding in vocal tracks and electronic elements, among other changes) for their next album, Every Day. It reached #54 in the UK Albums Chart in May 2002.[2]

In 2006, The Cinematic Orchestra created a cover version of the Radiohead song "Exit Music (For a Film)" that appeared on an album titled Exit Music: Songs with Radio Heads. In this piece the band slowed down the tempo of the original, divided the timbre into four sections beginning with saxophone, to the classical guitar, to the electric guitar, ending the piece with the same simple acoustic guitar rhythm as the original version.

Ninja Tune invited The Cinematic Orchestra to perform at the twentieth anniversary gala performance of the label at the Royal Albert Hall in November 2010.[5]

In 2011, The Cinematic Orchestra commissioned a series of compositions for avant-garde short films that were performed at the Barbican Centre under the auspices of its curating a series entitled "In Motion", (also featuring Dorian Concept with saxophonist Tom Chant, Grey Reverend, and Austin Peralta),[6] and it subsequently released the album In Motion #1 in 2012.[7]

On 20 October 2016, The Cinematic Orchestra released a new song from their upcoming album. The title of the song is "To Believe" featuring singer Moses Sumney. The group have also announced a tour, including shows with Thundercat, Gilles Peterson, Jameszoo, and others.[8] In an interview with The Guardian, Swinscoe announced that a new album, titled To Believe, would be coming out early in 2017.[9]

A shorter version of the song "That Home", with a slightly different composition, has also been used on occasion, such as an episode of Teen Wolf, in an episode of Suits,[14] in the trailer for the 2011 Sundance award-winning film Another Earth and in the ABC drama Defying Gravity. It also featured in the seventh-season finale of the FOX dance competition So You Think You Can Dance. It was also featured in a trailer for the NBC drama Awake. Most recently it was featured as one of the dance performance songs in the 2012 motion picture Step Up Revolution.